Getlink Se Unsp/Adr

Good morning, everyone. With us today, Jacques Gounod, Chairman of the Board, Yann Leriche, Chief Executive Officer, Géraldine, Chief Financial Officer, and Virginie Rousseau, Capital Markets Director. I hand over to Jacques.

Thank you, Anne-Sophie. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It's always a pleasure to comment our 23 results, which is not too difficult today. You have seen that we are in line with the consensus. We are announcing an EBITDA which is close to 1 billion euros. So I think it's something which is at least historical results and exceptional results. This is, of course, and Jan will explain, Geraldine will explain. This is related to the very strong results we got from ElecLink. ElecLink, it is the first year where we have the full exercise, full results. Of course, we are still discovering this specific growing electricity market. And of course, we had strong benefit from the energy crisis. This will be commented later. What is important, of course, is that we have now a serious real pile of cash. And the best use of this cash, of course, is to serve dividends. And we will propose at the next AGM on the 7th of May an increase of 10% of the dividend up to 55 cents per share. I would like to apologize for the 23 guidance. which is, of course, 910 below both consensus and the results, 979 million euros, because we are always cautious. Once again, I repeat that it is the first year of full completion of the electronic operations, so we are cautious. We were very cautious. We are used to be very cautious, to be very conservative, and I think we are in the same mood for 24. Yann will comment the guidance, but we do prefer to announce something which is more reasonable due to the change in the electricity market, which is really the driver of the change we are proposing, keeping in mind that we prefer to deliver than to promise. So all in all, I must say that for this year, where we will celebrate the 30th anniversary of the opening of the tunnel, we have some outstanding results. And I do think that you will share our optimism for the future. Jan, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Jacques. Good morning, everyone. I'm pleased to be here with you today, along with our team that was presented. And so I will speak about our 2023 full-year results, which are the best ever for GetLink. So, I will start by explaining how we were able to achieve this performance, then Géraldine will present the detailed financial results, and I will finish with the outlook. I am on page four. In 2023, we reached an EBITDA of $979 million, the highest level ever achieved by the group. This unprecedented performance was obtained thanks to the exceptional contribution from Eleclin, but also by the strong resilience of Eurotunnel and Europort in a challenging market environment. To achieve these results, we stuck to our strategy, providing attractive services to our customers in all our businesses and capturing their willingness to pay. To be able to continue on this successful path in 2023, we also worked hard to prepare our group for the future. This means reinforcing our competitive advantages For example, by implementing an efficient plan for EES in order to stretch the channel crossing time gap with the ferries, or by unlocking high-speed passenger rail services from London to European capitals to increase tunnel usage. Our main 2023 figures are on page 5. Our EPTA reached $979 million in 2023, representing an 11% percent increase compared to the 2022 level. The main EBDA growth driver was ElecLink, which was operational for the whole of 2023, compared with just seven months in 2022, as operations started at the end of May of that year. In 2023, ElecLink generated an EBDA of $368 million, After deducting a 156 million provision for the profit sharing mechanism, we will come back on the PSM later on today. 582 million were generated by Eurotunnel and 29 million by Europort. This records a big year translated into an outstanding cash generation with free cash flow after debt service reaching 638 million. On page six, you can see Eurotunnel traffic. In 2023, our truck shuttle volumes were under pressure, mostly because of the intense competition from ferry companies. Two of them are deviating from the social models applicable in France and in the UK, and hence reducing their staff costs by approximately 60%. Despite that, we confirm our market leader status on the short straight. Our Le Château Pax traffic was up 6% versus 2022, with a market share of 58% above pre-crisis levels. Eurostar performed very well in 2023. Traffic is back close to historical levels, with 10.7 million passengers transported, up 29% compared to 2022. We will now go into more detail about the main highlights, and our main initiatives in each of our segments. So let's start with our passenger shuttle business on slide seven. As you know, our passenger shuttle traffic remains below pre-crisis. However, our mix of customers has changed with the drop in day trip and overnight tickets, while longer stay tickets are already 3% above 2019 level. To better serve those customers, who have needs which in certain areas are different from what they were before, we continued to enhance our service offerings with the full rebrand of our commercial service, a new booking app, and the refresh of our UK passenger terminal buildings. This had a direct impact on our Net Promoter Score, which improved nicely in 2023 from 34 to 41. Slide eight, as you know, Truck shuttle business has evolved in adverse context in 2023, with competition having reached a peak. Indeed, in 2023, because of our high electricity costs, we had to charge our customers a high EVA while the low oil price was favorable to ferries. This penalizing energy mix in 2023 was not offset by the carbon tax, which only became applicable in the maritime sector on January 1st, 2024. In addition, whilst anti-social dumping laws were voted both in France and in the UK in 2023, we are still waiting for them to come into force. This means that these two laws have not yet brought the level playing field back to the cross-channel market. In this context, we continue to fight to strengthen our competitive advantages. We want to be always faster, safer, greener, more reliable, and improve the services we offer to our customers, whether hauliers or our truck drivers. Like for pack shuttles, this work had a direct impact on our NPS, which improved by 20 points in 2023, a great achievement. So from 23 to 43. On slide nine, you can see that our shuttle yield increased by 5% in 2023. This is mainly driven by the increase of our energy surcharge for our truck customers that we call EVA, but is also underpinned by our successful and ever more efficient marketing strategy. Slide 10, yield optimization was absolutely key to limit the impact of inflation. In 2023, inflation remained high, with eurotunnel energy charges at a record level. In this context, we also continued our strict cost discipline, for instance, by accelerating our action plan to improve our energy efficiency. Page 11, 2023 was a remarkable year for our railway business, remarkable in terms of traffic performance at plus 29%, but also in terms of news flows with the announcements of new players willing to launch new high-speed rail service between London and continental Europe. These projects confirm the high potential for growth of the cross-channel passenger rail market. I will come back to this later on. Moving now to Electlink on page 12. In 2023, Electlink continued to post an outstanding operating performance with an impressive availability of the asset above 98%. Electlink benefited last year from a very favorable electricity market, which enabled the group to reach 558 million sales and 368 million EBITDA after having booked a 156 provision for the profit-sharing mechanism. We continue to discuss the application of this profit-sharing mechanism with the authorities, and Gerardine Perichon, our CFO, will provide you more details on this provision in a minute. Page 13, Europort posted a 9% revenue growth in 2022 with an EBITDA flat at 29 million, penalized by energy costs, and many strikes at SNCF Réseau, the French rail network operator. Page 14, 2023 was a remarkable year in terms of financial and performance, but also a year during which we continue to invest in our future. We spent $159 million on CAPEX with two major programs, our passenger shuttle refurbishment, a structuring program that will last several years, and which serve multiple objectives, lowering our maintenance costs, increasing capacities, but also improving our customer experience. The second main 2023 CAPEX program is related to EES, the European Entry-Exit System, to preserve our traffic fluidity. We are investing in our terminals to create a dedicated EES zone. We also built digital twins of our terminals to model the EES impact and ensure that we preserve our throughput and the quality of service for our customers. Our ambition is to turn EES into an opportunity to increase our competitive edge versus the fairies. Slide 15, before leaving the floor to Géraldine on financial results, I will finish with our ESG performance. In 2023, we reduced our greenhouse gas emissions by 10.5% compared with 2022, confirming the group's trajectory towards achieving a minus 30% reduction in its emissions in 2025 compared to 2019. Our alignment with European taxonomy remains at a record high of 93% of our sales. On the social front, we are also improving our metrics with 28% of the top three management levels being women, exceeding our target of 25%. This clearly reflects the impact of initiatives implemented on the brand and relates to management to promote gender equal access to technical carriers. So next page. On ESG, we are not satisfied with just being good performance. We also want to share a few convictions. This was one of the objectives of the creation of the decarbonized margin last year, linking financial and climate performance. The decarbonized margin is the ABD margin, including a new charge, still virtual at this stage, corresponding to a carbon bill, should we have to pay for CO2 emissions. In 2023, even with the carbon cost at 201 euro per ton, our decarbonized margin would only be 3% lower than our actual EBITDA. This pioneering indicator generated a lot of positive reactions. For example, it is now mentioned in the 2024 edition of the Verniman, which is a leading academic finance book in finance. I will stop here for the first part, and now Géraldine Perrichon will present our financial results. Géraldine.